the great vegan experiment

so there i was...attending the local premier of "forks over knives", a fabulous documentary on the health benefits of a plant based diet (and the devastating potential for negative impact on your health from the "typical american diet").  i left the theater with a whole new plateful of knowledge and a lot of questions and a curiosity about eating a plant based diet i had never had before.

vegetarianism and veganism always freaked me out before watching the film. i didn't understand it, and frankly, couldn't think of one legitimate reason to even consider giving it a whirl. enter "forks over knives".  i was shocked to hear that many studies have directly and repeatedly linked animal proteins to all kinds of craziness. and while its easy enough to digest the information, "ok so a few random scientists have come up with experiments to prove their point" what really struck me about the film were the medical doctors using ONLY dietary changes to successfully treat all kinds of medical issues - high cholesterol, heart disease...even cancer! woa. hearing their testimonials (particularly striking coming from an MD who grew up working on his parents dairy farm) and those of their patients is what really hit home with me.

so our family embarked on an experiment - shifting completely to a vegan diet for an unknown period of time.  i had no idea where the experiment would take us or how it would go, especially with two small children. the transition to eating only plant based food, absolutely no animal protein or byproducts, was easier than imagined.  the family didn't seem to mind any of the countless great recipes i was shocked to find. and after doing much research i learned that you really can get all the nutrition you need from plants (yes, even calcium without cow's milk. yes, even protein without meat! shocking, i know).  hubby seemed pleasantly surprised on a regular basis on how plant-based meals could actually taste good.

the "before". we felt we ate healthy. i cooked mostly from scratch and bought much of our produce from the farmers market or mostly organic from the grocery. compared to "the average american diet" we were doing pretty well on the health factor, we felt.  definitely weren't in a super-size-me rut...however, our diets were pretty much organized strictly "around" the main entree which always involved some sort of animal protein (mostly chicken and turkey with occasional beef) and lots of fruit and carbs and a few veggies tossed in for good measure. 

the transition.  the most notable change during the transition period (first two-ish weeks) - we all used the bathroom a LOT more.  the shift to all fruits and veggies and beans and grains allowed our digestive systems to operate a lot more efficiently. not such a big deal for the grownups in the house (we actually felt GREAT as a result), but the diapers and potty-training variety got a lot more "exciting".  my awesomely supportive hubby got really excited about having so much more energy throughout the work day. he reported the mid-day-slump or the early afternoon crash was non-existent with the new eating habits in place.  other than having to explain what he was having for lunch (what IS that??) to his co-workers, he seemed overall pleased with the way he felt.  i had a similar experience.  that being said, i experienced a lot of mild anxiety over meal-planning... particularly with two small ones to feed. it had to be food they would eat (and could eat....since one of the littles had only a few tiny teeth, not much grinding could be done).  it seemed more pressing that they got a full round of nutrition now for some reason (not sure why i wasn't so calculating with their nutrition when we had meat in our diets, i think it just seemed like it covered all the bases).  we did fine, they did not suffer or go hungry, but i always had a pang of awareness in my gut about how it could go badly if i didn't monitor it closely (which is true even when eating animal protein, again, not sure why it was so much higher on my radar when we omitted that from our diets....probably 29 years of programming about what a normal/nutritional diet was).

the pregnancy.  soon after we chose to try this new eating strategy on for size we found out we were expecting our third baby. people outside our tiny family expressed concern about the choice to eat a plant based diet while pregnant and most assumed we would not continue as it would be "unhealthy". after doing a lot of research and talking to more than one midwife, i determined i would continue feeding my body with a plant based diet and practice awareness on how i felt. if it felt wrong, i would change things.  because i was also breastfeeding my youngest daughter at the time of my pregnancy, there was a significant "output" demand on my body. i was eating constantly. i would eat a HUGE meal and would be famished again soon after.  i drank homemade healthy protein smoothies daily (with hemp protein, you get about 26 g of protein from 3T of hemp = awesome, lots of spinach and other healthy goodies in them) and that helped with the hunger and the unending demand on my system.  i was much more in tune now with ensuring we had lots and lots of complete proteins in our diet (quinoa and beans and lots of them!) since i was building a baby.

the vacation.  about a month after our plant based shift we took a three week trip home to visit family. i told our families about our new eating philosophy and they were all supportive and did a great job of making special considerations for us while we were there.  i think we all learned a lot in the process.  it was fun watching our families try new plant-based recipes, and many times they were shocked at how great they tasted (the sweet potato lasagna was a big hit!). traveling and adhering to an "atypical" diet like this does have its challenges and it was hard for me to feel so high maintenance everywhere we went.  it was also hard because there are lots of foods we associate with home - fun foods, like monical's pizza and steak 'n shake, which are neither plant based nor remotely healthy....but they are oh-so-delicious (and while i'm all about the "let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food" statement hippocrates made back in the day, there is something to be said for soul food, no?).  anyway, our second week home, the baby growing in my belly and my surging hormones decided suddenly that everything we had been eating (beans, grains, salad) were all super super nasty and that i should be eating pizza and hotdogs. it was hard because i literally felt sick at the thought of eating a bean burger. i saw an orange soda in the fridge and that's all i could think about. and i was starving ALL THE TIME. and due to the hunger, i caved. i started out with a little here and a little there and by the end of the week, i had sort of given in at least part way. i was incorporating at least some animal protein into all my meals. my darling husband stuck to the plant based diet and i kept the kids on it too (other than the occasional "you have to eat ice cream at grandma's house scenario) because i didn't want their little guts to have more "excitement" switching back over while we were on vacation.  while i felt really satisfied during the meals, i felt gross and nauseated afterward each time (shock to my system i think re-learning how to digest animal proteins). it was a difficult period. i was grumpy and fatigued and uncomfortable and having lots of stress about whether or not we were doing the right thing. and frankly i didn't have the energy or emotional stability (thank you first trimester hormones) to manage it all.  thank you families for tolerating me during this gross time.

the decision. we came home to our own kitchen and our own pantry and resumed the plant based eating. i cut out the meat stuff when we got home and actually started feeling better again, not so much unbearable fatigue and nausea associated with meals. but as i got farther and farther into my first trimester, the hungry just wasn't stopping no matter how much veggie protein i consumed.  i decided listening to my body was important.  we added greek yogurt (super high in protein) and organic eggs from the farmers market into our diet, just a little bit here and there. eggs for breakfast a couple days a week, yogurt on the other days.  just recently we have also added organic, hormone-free, free-range chicken back in - i buy the whole chicken and cook it in the slow cooker and we use little bits of it on sandwiches or in recipes. and while i am very much in support of the plant-based diet and while i can no longer call myself a "vegan" (that title really freaked me out anyway, WAAAAY too politically charged of a label for my liking - other people seemed to think it meant a lot more about me as a person than just my eating preferences), i felt a lot more at ease with our dietary choices for nutrition. and my sandwiches, look a lot different now. usually a whole grain pita wrapped around a load of lettuce, a bunch of veggies (tomatoes, mushrooms, yellow bell pepper, cucumber), sometimes some hummus, sometimes some vegenaise (vegan mayonnaise which tastes THE SAME as the "real deal"), a tiny bit of chicken, usually no cheese or just a tiny bit if i add it.

i would say we are still eating a whole foods, plant-based diet....because we are still primarily cooking from scratch, from whole foods that we buy at the market in their original form (no processing, direct from the farmer whenever we can)  - but we are including meat in our diet again. this time we just have a different focus. i am still using and seeking out new recipes - we tried some awesome white bean enchiladas the other night that were basically vegetarian, just a little bit of cheese mixed in, quite delicious...i am just not 100% eliminating animal proteins from our diet. instead i am being much more selective about which animal proteins i allow into our diets...particularly the quality and source of those animal proteins, whenever i can control it.

and while this has nothing to do with physical health and nutrition, i think there is something to be said for being able to enjoy a hot dog every once in a rare while when you are two years old. and i think there is something to be said for being able to enjoy a delicious meal when you are out on a date with your hubby. while its not its primary purpose, there is a beautiful sensory experience involved with eating and sometimes on those rare special occasions, its nice to choose food just for the pleasure of the experience.  when we were eating only plants in our diet, we felt rotten whenever we slipped a little animal protein into our meal (enter our 6th anniversary dinner when i ordered a dish with shrimp involved) because our bodies were shocked and didn't know what to do with it.  anyway, its not scientific or nutritionally important, but i do want to be sure we maintain that food is sometimes about other things too - tradition, celebration.  as long as its a sometimes approach to eating and not an always approach to eating which is what has gotten our country into the obesity epidemic we are in!  and please don't get me wrong, we really did (sometimes surprisingly) really enjoy 95% of what i prepared during our experiment with eating a vegan diet.

some of my uneasiness came from all the gobs of soy-based protein that was is so typical in a vegan diet. everything "substituted" for animal protein seemed to contain soy. soy milk was the recommendation for replacing cow's milk (we use almond and coconut milk). soy yogurt for dairy yogurt. soy ice cream. soy burgers and hotdogs for the meat version. tofu for protein in entrees. everything was soy based. and with something like 90% of the soy being of the GMO variety, that was two strikes against it (soy is fine but in large quantities there are studies showing issues with phytoestrogens and health). it was too much. the "everything in moderation" mantra kept seeping to the forefront when making choices about soy.

i think more of my uneasiness came from the two major camps of vegan eating...and finding recipes and products that fit MY version of it. some do it for the animal factor. i was doing it for the health factor - but more important than "being vegan" to me was i wanted to be eating REAL FOOD chock full of nutrition. not substitutes. not chemical versions made to taste like the real thing. and i found it was really easy to go hunting down the "Just like cheese" product or the "tastes like chicken" seitan product. they were tasty. but they were less "whole foods" than the chicken i was choosing not to eat and it just didn't rest well with me. i think i found myself needing more balance toward the real food aspect. i found myself preferring to eat small servings of organic healthy chicken over large quantities of something made to resemble chicken, even if it was plant based.

another component of our decision was out of necessity for hubby's job - he was spending a lot of time out "in the field" and away from our kitchen with little to no access to anything fresh, anything resembling whole foods, let alone plant based foods. and each time he left and returned home again, his digestive system went through its own little shock phase.  reintroducing some animal proteins to our daily diet helped him transition back and forth a bit more, although i know he misses a big salad or a fresh made smoothie full of fruity nutrition and green tasty goodness.  i remember my days in the navy when we had been out to sea long enough for all of our fresh veggies and fruits to run out (or be rotten)....it got to the point where i craved fruit so badly that i asked my mom to mail me some containers of applesauce and fruit cocktail (yeah, that stuff that sort of tastes like fake fruit all cut up and floating in syrup-y grossness) because it was the closest thing to fruit that could be mailed to me.

i think what shocked us most was actually tasting our food, tasting the individual components of it - the flavoring came FROM the food instead of coming from salt or dressings or mounds of cheese.  that was a really wonderful lesson to learn - tasting the food making up your meal, not just covering it all up with something.  a lesson we will carry forward, even when including animal proteins. using a LOT less cheese. using vegetables to flavor dishes instead of covering up the flavoring of vegetables with heavy sauces.  i also found a lot of new fun ways to "sneak" more vegetables into our meals. sautee some swiss chard, then toss it in the blender with a delicious organic marinara sauce. suddenly everyone is eating swiss chard with dinner and not even knowing it. :)

on dairy. while we are including things like greek yogurt and small amounts of organic (sometimes raw) cheese in our diet, we have continued to eliminate cow's milk, replacing it with almond milk and sometimes coconut milk. we simply substitute it for cow's milk in all our recipes and even drink it with meals and use it in smoothies.  the reasons for this are a whole separate post, but we certainly have not missed it. and the beautiful thing is, almond milk is 1:1 the same amount of calcium as cow's milk. how beautiful is that? it is not, however, high in protein like cow's milk so our protein comes from other sources in our diet.  i did discuss our nutrition with our pediatrician at our latest check-up for the kids. he said he was impressed with my awareness and focus on nutrition and said the kids were both healthy and thriving and while our choices differed somewhat from the "typical" recommendations, he felt confident we were covering our nutritional bases.

anyway, i'm very glad i've been exposed to so much new information regarding nutrition. the vegan experiment has certainly impacted my thoughts on what makes up a meal and has made me much more conscious about the consumer choices i make at the market as well as my meal planning strategies.  i'm poised to read the books "nourishing traditions" and "real food" because they are all very focused on homemade meals high in local, organic veggies and fruits - but they also include healthy sources of fat like coconut oil and healthy animal proteins.  for our family, this approach settles better in my heart. i struggled with a lot of anxiety about food for some reason when we were eating a vegan diet, i'm not sure of the source, but i know i am much more at ease "allowing" a tiny bit of healthy animal proteins back into our diet.

i think food is a very personal subject (particularly with mom's, its right up there on the list of be-careful-who-you-discuss-this-with-so-you-don't-offend-someone list with vaccinations and religion) and everyone needs to explore what is right for their family.  i have several dear friends who eat a 100% vegan diet and it works for their family. there are other friends who are vegatarian and others who eat a little bit of everything.  my experience from all of this is to practice awareness of your food choices, understand why you are eating what you are eating. do your homework and understand the hazards out there (like EWG's dirty dozen list for the 12 produce items you should definitely buy organic if you can only afford to buy organic for those 12 items because of the types/quantities of pesticide residue they carry) and the ingredients particularly in the packaged food you buy. i used to market with a different strategy - i bought what sounded good, what had a cute package, what i "felt like"....now i always look at the nutrition label for the ingredients. i don't pay a lot of attention to calorie counting or sodium content, i just look at the ingredients. i want fewer ingredients and i want to be able to identify the ingredients in the product. i don't want fillers or additives or chemical versions of the real deal. i want it as close to the whole food as possible (often that means making our own at home which i'm surprised is so easy to do!).  essentially, i am practicing more awareness about my choices and that makes me feel empowered in a grocery store full of, unfortunately, a lot of products that do not have your health, your nutrition or your best interest at heart.  the sad part about a trip to the market is - those products that lack health benefits or nutritional content are the ones that people will often choose due to their more affordable price tag. its an understandable choice when you need to feed your family. it complicates the issue so much further than educating yourself and being conscious of your consumer choices - because people will choose to feed their family first, and if they can swing it, they will do their best to include nutritious (often more expensive) items in their meals. i get it. there is no good answer. i get that you can often eat at mcdonald's cheaper than you can make a healthy meal in your own home. again, i don't write this with any social agenda or critique other than to share my experience.  food is personal. just be sure to make it personal - don't let crafty marketers and ads pressure you in a direction. its your body. its your health. and its your responsibility to protect that.  i fully believe in the healing power of feeding your body with real nutrition and absolutely consider our food part of our daily "multivitamin".  you are not just eating to stay alive, you are eating to fuel all of your body systems.